Watson Gets Another Big Project to Work On

IBM’s Supercomputer Teams Up with AT&T

Last week, IBM and AT&T announced a partnership to deliver open-source tools and services to support developers of Internet of things (IoT) applications. IBM brings the power of Watson to the partnership and AT&T will provide access to its IoT platforms.

Developers will be able to use IBM’s Watson open APIs to hook into AT&T’s IoT platforms to gain deeper insights from data collected from connected devices. Multiple Watson APIs and other IBM services, including visual recognition, personality insights, trade-off analytics and speech analysis and translation, will be available to developers.

The IBM Watson IoT Platform enables users to connect devices in a secure environment and build applications tapping advanced analytics and cognitive services. It also uses intelligent learning to help manage the data, constantly learning and improving.

This partnership between AT&T and IBM comes two years after a partnership between the two centred on the creation of IoT apps for smart cities. In 2014, IBM and AT&T pledged to combine their analytic platforms, cloud and security technologies to help organizations gain more insights into data collected from sensors in a variety of industries.

The deal is one of a series of announcements involving major firms entering into IoT partnerships. For example, a week ago General Electric announced that it is making its Predix IoT platform available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. And last month, IBM teamed up with Cisco Systems to combine Watson with IoT edge servers.

This combination of open standards and proprietary technologies from IBM and AT&T could lead to a new level of IoT possibilities and solutions for developers to exploit in the future. However, in a field that’s still highly fragmented with what seems like a series of non-stop “major” announcements, there’ll have to be some tangible implementations to really get things moving.